Occupation of Independence

There must be people out there who are ten times better than me at internet searching. I don't even like buying things on the internet, other than music.  Today I dropped in on the local car dealer in Gunnison CO just to kick some tires. I was suspicious that my internet searches were at a dead end. As luck would have it, this dealer had recent models of all the categories I polemicized about, last post. It was uncanny. What an amazing difference there is between seeing something real and merely reading about it. Just think how good those reviewers made the Dodge Durango and Chevy Traverse sound. One glance at them and I chopped them off the list. They had those annoyingly-low, plastic, front-bumper skirts (air dams) that hang down to about 4 inches from the ground. Ridiculous! You couldn't even get close to a concrete curbstone with one of those suburban mommie-mobiles. The Subaru Outback had a high and clean undercarriage, but it didn't look like a real hitch could

It is easy to overlook things when you think alone, so I might benefit from readers' ideas about choosing a tow vehicle to pull my converted cargo trailer: 2900 pounds loaded, 6 foot wide, 350 pounds of tongue weight. But before getting concrete, let's reflect on the temptations in thinking that I can tow this trailer with 'almost anything.' Wasn't it Oscar Wilde who said something like 'A cynic is someone who knows the price of everything, but the value of nothing?' Well, 'brevity is the soul of wit' and that aphorism is brief, pithy, and easy to remember. But is it actually informative about what makes a cynic? I think not. A cynic is not a "negative" person. Rather, he is someone who has been undisciplined with his expectations about new situations and people. He has the bad habit of expecting too much, and therefore, he is usually disappointed, if not completely disillusioned, by how things turn out. He then reacts to that disappoin

Yet another summer visit, sponging up the remarkable hospitality of a couple in Ouray, CO. In case I needed any more proof how important people were to an interesting travel lifestyle, I certainly got it.  There is a real advantage to a migrational loop that is approximately the same every year: it seems necessary to help friendships get beyond the 'two ships passing in the night' syndrome that some people prefer.  Short-term acquaintances seem uninteresting and frivolous to me. There is the tediousness and predictability of playing 20 Questions with them; the struggle to charm each other's socks off; adding another scalp to your belt, for whatever that is worth; and then you never see them again. Then on to Gunnison CO to meet up with a friend from Patagonia AZ, and her friend. It was a real pleasure to talk around a campfire with other people. I gave up campfires years ago, partly because of the labor and fire safety, but mainly because you need a little tribe of p